Lighttpd 1.4.20 is out

http://www.lighttpd.net/2008/9/30/1-4-20-otherwise-the-terrorists-win

by hs • 18 years ago

20 6 18 years ago

jbyers• 18 years ago

I was a big fan of lighttpd in 2006. It saved us from Apache (in our case replacing Apache + mod_php with lighttpd + php via fastcgi) at a time when we had an acute need to scale up on a limited set of hardware.

But in the last two and a half years, I've lost that positive feeling. Development has slowed dramatically -- point releases are infrequent, version 1.5 seems mired in rewrite after rewrite, bugs with detailed reports go untouched in trac. We had to restart our lighttpds every few days due to memory leaks. More minor issues like true graceful restarts and better proxy features were pushed off to 1.5.

We've since moved critical frontend serving and proxying to nginx, and after almost a year, it's been a dream. nginx has not failed once in billions of requests. We've pushed dozens of configuration changes, served big files, little files, proxying, keepalives, misbehaving clients, SSL, everything. Nginx just keeps on going. No memory leaks, no spurious logging, no complaints. I have literally restarted it once on our production servers, and that's because I'm an idiot and typed "restart" instead of "reload". I was sad. I thought we might get a year of uptime or more on the nginx master processes.

My only complaint about nginx is that the development process itself is less transparent than many open source projects. There are active English and Russian mailing lists, and Igor is stunningly responsive but I wish that there was an open issue tracker, source tree, etc. But that's a minor complaint against an otherwise fantastic piece of software.

ComputerGuru• 18 years ago

Same here except we switched to our own home-brew server to serve static and PHP files in-tandem with IIS.

Lighttpd was and still is amazing, but the lack of direction and precise management with regards to the 1.5 release has really hurt their fanbase.

aditya• 18 years ago

convince him to move to github by forking it? :-)

rgrieselhuber• 18 years ago

Agreed on nginx. Even with the relative lack of docs, etc. it's so easy to work with and it never fails. I've never once had a problem.

I've never tried lighttpd because of the dreaded memory leak that everyone talks about.

toxik• 18 years ago

nginx has crazy, crazy configuration flexibility. I mean really, the likes of which I've never seen - the things I've done with it...

Things that I'd normally write a small FastCGI script for, I make nginx do only through its configuration and core options.

nginx - best thing to come out of Russia since the Tesla Coil.

ivankirigin• 18 years ago

Tesla was Serbian http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla

Lighttpd 1.4.20 is out

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